The German-Dutch Communist Left - Libcom

The proletariat’s political struggle was just as decisive. It had to fight both revisionism, which had gone over to
the bourgeoisie, and centrism represented by Kautsky, but also by Roland Holst, who represented the centrist
current in Holland. While Kautsky’s current was not a bourgeois one, but a pseudo-“radical” current which
wanted to “turn back the wheel of history” by advocating “an impotent, utopian resistance” to imperialism, it
was all the more dangerous in its centrism. It served as a bridge to the bourgeois current of the social democracy,
and should be fought as such.
But ‘centrism’ was most dangerous in its pacifist guise. To take the revolutionary road, the proletariat had first to
reject the struggle for peace, advocated by the pacifist currents within the workers’ movement: “Both as
hypocrisy and self-deceit, and as a means for better enslaving and exploiting, the pacifist movement is the other
side of the imperialist coin... The pacifist movement is an attack by bourgeois imperialism against proletarian
socialism.” 315 Finally, and above all, without a real International, created by the proletariat itself, there could be
no real revolutionary movement. There was no shadow of doubt as to the possibility of a ‘new International’
emerging from the war. Unlike Lenin in September 1914, Gorter did not yet call this the 3 rd International.
Gorter’s pamphlet was hailed as a model by Lenin, who had also read Pannekoek’s articles against the war,
nationalism, and kautskyism. With its radical analyses, it broke with the position adopted by Henriëtte Roland
Holst who, at the same moment in her pamphlet The socialist proletariat and peace (Dec. 1914), defended a
pacifist viewpoint, without mentioning the ‘betrayal’ of the social democracy and the need for a new
International. 316
The SDP and the Zimmerwald Conference
Gorter’s pamphlet and Pannekoek’s articles posed concretely the necessity of renewing international links
among the Marxist groups, in order to lay the foundations for the ‘new International’.
It is significant that their position, for working energetically for the international regroupment of all socialists
opposed to the war, and the partisans of the new International, remained an isolated one within their own party.
Gorter and Pannekoek wanted the SDP to take part wholeheartedly in the International Conference advocated by
the Bolsheviks amongst others, at the end of the summer of 1915.
The idea of renewing international relations among parties of the 2 nd International opposed to the war, originated
in the parties of ‘neutral’ countries. Already, on 27 th September 1914, a conference took place in Lugano
(Switzerland), between the Swiss and Italian parties. The conference proposed to “struggle by every means
against the further extension of the war to other countries”. Another conference of ‘neutral parties’ was held on
17 th /18 th January 1915 in Copenhagen, with delegates from the Scandinavian parties and the SDAP (the same
party which had excluded the Tribunists in 1909). Neither conference had any echo in the workers’ movement.
They proposed to reaffirm ‘the principles of the International’, which had died on 4 th August 1914. But whereas
the Dutch and Scandinavians reformists appealed to the International Socialist Bureau to hold a peace’
conference of the parties which had adopted ‘social chauvinism’, the Swiss and Italian parties moved hesitantly
towards a break. In January 1915, for example, the Swiss SP voted to stop paying subscriptions to the late 2 nd
International. The break was only a timid one, since the conference of the Swiss and Italian parties held in
Zürich in May 1915, passed a resolution calling for “the forgetting of the weaknesses and faults of brother
parties in other countries”. 317 In the midst of a military bloodbath, the slogans of ‘general disarmament’ and
‘non-violent annexations’ were put forward.
315 Gorter, idem, p. 151.
316 H. Roland Holst, Het socialistische proletariaat en de vrede (Amsterdam: J.J. Bos), no date [1915], firstly published in:
De Nieuwe Tijd, Vol. 30, Nov. 1914, pp. 734-752 & 764-783.
317 See: J. Humbert-Droz, op. cit.; H. Lademacher, Die Zimmerwalder Bewegung. Protokolle und Korrespondenz, vols. I/II,
(The Hague/Paris: Mouton 1967).
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